Jag Blog

Ive always wanted to do a shoot with a ferris wheel in the background and it worked out well that one of my best friends also wanted shots of his car at a amusement park.

When a traveling fair had set up not to far from us we made plans for the shoot. So one night we headed out. We got super lucky that where the ferris wheel was set up there was actually a little parking lot right behind. It was also super cool that the ferris wheel was a new one that uses all LED lights.

I had my buddy position his car how I wanted. I had to have him park to give good sight to the ferris wheel but also to hide two parked cars.

For the shoot I was using my trusty little Olympus OMD EM5 with a 12-40 2.8 lens mounted on my Mefoto travel tripod.

The first shot I had framed up was not doing it for me so I quickly recomposed and started firing off frames. I was shooting at a very slow shutter speed in order to get the movement of the ferris wheels. To light the car I was light painting using two small video lights. It was a bit of a pain because the ferris wheel would only spin a few revolutions and then stop. I had to time everything properly because my EM5 MK1 does not have a remote release so I would have to release the shutter hobble over ( I was dealing with a bum knee at the time ) do the light painting and get out of the way before the shutter closed. Took me 4/5 shots to get the light the way I wanted.

Having one composition in the bag I decided to do a vertical shot to tighten up the framing. I quickly set up my cam and with pretty much the same settings I started shooting.

This time it only took a few frames and I was happy with what I had. I was also in a lot of pain and not to mention where my tripod was set up was right infront of a dumpster that lets just say was due to be emptied. So with that we decided it was good for the night. With the photos done we decided to go check out the amusement park since both our wives were with us but pretty much as soon as we walked around the corner into the fair everything shut down! So we literally finished the shoot with like 2 mins to spare before the ferris wheel was shut down! From the time we showed up to when the lights were shut off was less then 10 minutes so we get super lucky.